These Trees Have Roots
by misssilivren
Summary: Narcissa visits her sister's grave, and old memories become entangled with thoughts of the future - and those who will carry it forward. Or, Narcissa decides to correct old mistakes. ::post-War::


**These Trees Have Roots**

**(They Grow Long and Deep)**

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_misssilivren_

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There is no funeral for Bellatrix Lestrange.

She is buried in the Lestrange family plot, just beyond the manor that will now be passed onto a second cousin whose grandfather was Muggleborn. (Saying _Mudblood_ is a mistake she is careful not to make; she already knows that the world is not finished extracting the price of the war from the Malfoys.) Bella would shriek with rage and swear to make him suffer for daring to hold the Lestrange estate, for having a claim to the Lestrange name.

The cemetery is haphazardly arranged, and there are white mausoleums erected to mark the resting places of dead heads of the family. Bella has a plain, slanting chunk of marble, carved with her name, date of birth and of death. Moss has not yet begun to grow into the etched letters, but Narcissa rubs them anyways, as if it will ward off unwanted growth. There are spells for these sorts of things, but no one cares what filth becomes streaked over the grave of Bellatrix Lestrange. If the whole estate were not warded, there would probably be obscenities painted on her gravestone already.

She looks around for a place to sit, but there are no benches or anything of the like that are present in the Malfoy cemetery. (At the manor, the dead lie bordered by white rose-bushes, arranged geometrically. There are house-elves who do nothing but polish the graves of countless dead, re-etching the names and dates when they grow weathered, replacing stone when it cracks or crumbles. Not so, here.) So she kneels down on the wet, springy grass, sitting on her heels and arranging her robes to lie across her knee. She folds her hand in her lap, and stares at the gravestone very directly, in precisely the same manner that she used to stare at Bella when she was going on one of her rants, back when they were children. Bella would stop her pacing and adopt a supercilious expression, thrusting her nose in the air and saying, "Now, Bellatrix, _stop_ this _vulgar_ nonsense, do you hear me? Really, _children_ these days," in a perfect imitation of their grandmother. Narcissa would dissolve into giggles, and Bellatrix would smirk at her, taking her hands and saying, "Cissy, you must _never_ become as stuffy as her, understand?"

The gravestone, of course, does none of these things. Bella is lying somewhere beneath Narcissa's folded legs, the flesh rotting off the exquisite cheekbones that Narcissa had always admired. Bella had looked far more Black than her, dark and tall and mysterious. Narcissa had inherited her mother's pale, Rosier, fine-china looks. She used to despise how breakable she seemed in comparison to Bella or Andromeda's bold lips, curling eyelashes, fiery cheeks. But then, perhaps Narcissa's unexceptional prettiness and pragmatism have served her well, in a way. Andromeda, passionate about all the wrong things, has been thrown out of the family and burned out of their hearts; Bellatrix...

Well. Bellatrix had been the smartest, most daring, most beautiful of them all. And now she lays in a box sunken under the fresh layer of new earth.

Narcissa feels her mind drain empty of thought, slowly, just as her chest has felt curiously absent of emotion since the end of the War. Lucius - in Azkaban. Draco, recovering. She had sent him to the small cottage, owned by the Malfoys, on the French coast. The last person to use it had been his great-uncle, who had been Lucius's favorite relative as a boy; the man used to keep his various lovers there. There had been, Narcissa recalled, some fuss when the man had died, and after a time spent sorting through his muddled papers it became clear that he had evidently left his house to his half-blooded bastard daughter; but she had relinquished the claim and it had reverted to Lucius, whose favorite relative is no longer that uncle.

Narcissa lets this thought sink into her mind for a time. Somewhere out there, maybe residing in France, there lives a blonde-haired witch with Malfoy blood, if not the name. She will, perhaps, have children, and they will be Malfoys, too. She wonders how many such children there are in the world, how many of the old, dead houses live on in people who refused or had been denied their proper name.

There was a half-Malfoy girl who had hated her absent father so much that she refused the expensive property he had left her. There was a child whose name had been blasted off the family tree as soon as she had been born. A baby boy who would be raised to deny one quarter of his heritage, and who would live with the mark of that family in his blood, fearing and rejecting it. She remembered the first instant she had known that Andromeda had had a child; sitting in the parlour, dropping her tea on the settee as she watched the swirling letters stitch themselves; _Nymphadora Tonks _gleaming golden on the wall. Narcissa had traced the letters once with a shaking finger, then drawn her wand and burned it off the tapestry. She wonders now if that tapestry, moldering on the wall of the neglected house they had grown up in, had a new name on it, or if it had learned never to spell out the names of anyone from that branch of the family.

She wonders about the little boy, the son of Nymphadora Tonks and Remus Lupin, the son of a half-blood and a werewolf, the son of her niece and a War hero. He will be raised by his grandmother - the thought of Andromeda as a grandmother is at once disturbing and laughable. Andromeda, who had been so sullen and quietly furious with her world. Who had always humoured Narcissa when she babbled on about Lucius Malfoy, despite Andy's own feelings about the then-boy; who'd hugged her when Bellatrix drove Narcissa to tears; who'd run off with a Mudblood Hufflepuff; who had sent three letters to Narcissa which had been burned without being opened.

Her mother had intercepted the owls, and kept the letters hidden. On the day that she finally knew that no new letters would come, Drucilla summoned Narcissa to her father's study, and showed her the letters in her pale, still hands. Then she had lit the fire, and she had burned them, one by one, slowly, feeding them into the flames and watching the parchment curl up delicately, charr and blacken, turn to ash. Narcissa had watched, motionless, and listened to her mother's exacting lecture, and didn't protest and say that it wasn't her fault that Andy had sent post. Narcissa had gone upstairs when she was dismissed, and cried. Bellatrix had found her curled up on her bed; had drawn her up by her wrist and slapped her hard. Narcissa had fled the house, feeling as though she would never be free, and stayed out in the woods surrounding the estate past midnight. When she returned, she had found that everyone had gone to bed.

It was the year after that summer that she had finally caught Lucius's eye. And a year after that, they became engaged, and they had been wed, and Draco had been born, and Lucius had revealed his place in the Dark Lord's plans, and somewhere along the line Narcissa had stopped thinking about Andromeda altogether.

She looka down at Bella's grave. The sky, temperamental in spring, is growing cloudy and thunderous. Narcissa stands, stiff and pained, passes a hand over the top of her sister's grave, and leaves the Lestrange estate. She makes sure to thank the new owner, who lookes at her with perplexed hostility, and nods once, wishing her a hesitant good day. She smiles at him cordially, and decides that she will not trouble this young man any further.

Or perhaps she will, at that. He is only a few years older than Draco - twenty-one at the most, and he already seems overwhelmed with his new mansion, his new wealth, his new place in society. Perhaps she will call on him again - not to visit her sister's grave, but a social visit. Perhaps.

For now, she has letters to write. To Lucius, in Azkaban; to an old friend in the Ministry, regarding Lucius's place in Azkaban; to her son in France... and maybe she can hunt around in the Manor and find Lucius's relative's address. And perhaps, while she is looking, she might stumble upon the place where she had secreted away Andromeda's address.

Narcissa smiles slightly, shakes off the last remnants of grave dirt from her robes, and begins mentally composing a few letters.

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_A/N_: Oh, Narcissa, my perfect perfect Slytherin, I don't understand why everyone is not madly in love with her like I am. D: I have missed writing her so much - in fact, I was working on this one thing which... well, it was going to be a little stylistically-odd drabble-thing, but then there started to be _plot_ and I had _ideas_ and now a -500 word drabble has become a 8K monster. And, alright, 8K might not seem that much for some of you guys but it's a lot _to me_. I am like the chronic drabble-er. This is scary.

So you can look forward to that, if you... I don't know, like my fics? *cringe* (Though many of you will be put off by the second-person uncapitalized rambling nature of it so sorry in advance and _why am I talking about a whole different fic in the AN section of something unrelated._)

Anyways, this basically makes me really really happy for some reason. I mean, the prose is nothing special for me - I've written better things. But I'm always reading these post-War fics in which everything is really terrible for the Malfoys and that makes me sad because honestly the Malfoys are my favorite. So I wrote this, and I guess subconsciously I decided to make it _not_ hopeless and_ not_ terrible for the most interesting family in, oh, every fandom, ever. And really. If anyone can pick the Malfoys back up, you _know_ it will be Narcissa. And then I started thinking about Andromeda and Tonks and Teddy, so now if anyone wants to give me fic where there is Narcissa/Teddy bonding, or something like that, I will be forever indebted.

So! Review, please? Just one word really makes me happy. Also, you _know_ that the greater the number of reviews, the more likely people are to click on the story. So, you'd be helping out in _two _ways! Thanks for reading!


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